“The saxophone is the cocaine of the woodwind family, the sax teacher continues. Saxophonists are admired because they are dangerous, because they have explored a darker, more sinister side of thems...”

“If I have learned one thing from experience, it is this: never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.”

“I see disappointment as something small and aggregate rather than something unified or great. With a little effort, every failure can be turned into something good.”

“Fiction is supposed to be immersive and supposed to be entertaining and narrative, so structures have to be buried a little bit. If they come foregrounded too much, it stops being fiction and start...”

“Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.”

“for Pop, who sees the starsand Jude, who hears their music”

“Creativity is the state of consciousness in which you enter into the treasury of your innermost being and bring the beauty into manifestation. (p.232)”

“Do you think I'm pretty?I think you're beautifulBeautiful?You are so beautiful, it hurts sometimes.”

“As if you were on fire from within.The moon lives in the lining of your skin.”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”